Summertime Sugar Cookies

Summertime generally brings parties (often of the kid variety in our household) and fun treats or BBQ’s. So these three adorable sugar cookies have gotten plenty of use around here and are perfect for a fun party or BBQ this summer!

You want wow factor with the greatest of ease?!

Choose these ice cream cone sugar cookies, these take very little skill and can be done with or by kids. The frosting is supposed to be messy and bumpy to resemble ice cream and the sprinkling of either mini chocolate chips or rainbow sprinkles covers a multitude of errors!!

All this requires (other than sugar cookie dough and icing) is a an ice cream shaped cookie cutter, food colouring, mini chocolate chips and rainbow sprinkles and you are in business!

Ready for a bit more a challenge…. then try these simple pineapples.

They require a bit more skill and patience as you need a piping bag and a wilton size 3 tip to make the green pineapple fronds. But once that sets (15 minutes in the fridge, or an hour room temp), spread on some yellow tinted royal icing and add gold pearlized sugar (one piece at a time) to resemble a pineapple.

Here’s how to make your own pineapple cookie shape, using a fluted, square cookie cutter:

Once cookies are cooked and cooled, pipe the green icing into fronds, then flood the cookies with yellow icing and place the gold pearlized sugar in a pattern to mimic pineapple designs, onto wet icing. Allow four hours to dry.

The third cookie seemed to steal everyone’s heart and is a new household fave. It has a few more steps to follow, but these little watermelons turn out so cute and are still very, very low on the frustration level, as long as you are working with true royal icing (yes that means with meringue powder). They turned out so well, we will actually be making another batch this week already!

To achieve a watermelon shape, simply use a round (I used a 2 1/2 inch) cookie cutter and then cut evenly in half.

Once cookies are cooked and cooled, pipe on a line along the outside cookie edge for the green rind (Wilton 3 tip). Allow to set up in the fridge 15 minutes.

Next pipe on white line directly inside the green line with your Wilton 3 tip. Allow to harden 15 minutes again in the fridge.

Next flood the rest of the cookies with the watermelon pink and place mini chocolate chips on to the wet icing for the watermelon seeds.

All three cookies started out the same way from my favourite sugar cookie recipe which can be found here.

I used a true royal icing based on this recipe here, but definitely needed to add considerably more liquid than called for, but wasn’t a big deal.

I tinted the colours with Wilton Gel Colours and used a disposable piping bag with a Wilton 3 tip.